Regardless of what happens in the economy, healthcare continues to be one of the most important, most popular, and fastest-growing industries.

Healthcare is one of the country’s largest industries, providing 14.3 million jobs in 2008 alone. And the industry is expected to generate 3.2 million new jobs between 2008 and 2018 — more than any other industry.

In addition, 10 of the 20 fastest-growing occupations are healthcare-related, and most positions require less than four years of college education.

Despite that, there is still a shortage of qualified workers to fill many of the available healthcare openings, and that gap is expected to worsen with time.

Even if you don’t want to be a nurse or doctor, if you’ve ever thought about getting into the healthcare field, now is the time to do so.

Immigrant rights activists express opposition to Arizona's law during an April 27 protest in New York.

Apparently, you can boycott an entire state if it passes a law that really makes you angry.

The target? Arizona.

The controversy? A new Arizona law that makes the failure to carry immigration documents illegal and gives police authority to question and detain individuals suspected of being in the United States illegally.

Critics have been outspoken. Protests have begun. The federal government says it may challenge the state law, which is the nation’s toughest against illegal immigration. And the backlash continues to grow.

Earth Day turns 40 today. So we thought we’d honor the day by giving you a roundup of past conversations from the show about our wonderful planet.

Environmentalist Annie Leonard“All of the stuff in our lives has this whole life before it comes to us in the metals where it’s mined, in the forests where the trees are felled, in the oceans where the fish are drawn, in the factories where children and women are working hard to make this stuff… Then it comes to us. We have it for minutes sometimes, throw it away, and then it goes to some dump or incinerator, often back overseas.” Watch interview

Green Jobs Advocate Van Jones“We need jobs in America, and right now if you want the jobs of tomorrow you have to make the products of tomorrow… I do not want to see this country go from importing dirty energy from the Middle East to importing clean energy technology from China and skip all the jobs in the middle. So to me, that’s the common ground, and the reason that this green jobs movement I think is so important.” Watch interview

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson“Still today… some people think that the environment is not an issue for people of color, and I hope that if nothing else I’m a very vibrant symbol of the fact that people of color should see themselves in the environmental movement. It’s extraordinarily important to them and their families.Watch interview

Also, be sure to watch tonight’s show with economics journalist Steven Solomon, who warns that access to fresh water will replace oil as the primary cause of global conflicts.

“When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water,” Benjamin Franklin quipped wisely over two centuries ago, long before it seemed conceivable that freshwater could become scarce across the planet or anyone imagined the need for an Earth Day.

Today, for the first time in human history, the global well is starting to go dry — and we are all about to learn the painful lessons of what happens when societies run short of history’s most indispensable resource.

Freshwater is overtaking oil as human society’s scarcest critical resource. And just as oil transformed the history of the 20th century, freshwater scarcity is starting to re-define the geopolitics, economics, environment, national security, and daily living conditions of the 21st century.

What is happening, essentially, is that under the duress of the voracious demand of our global industrial society that uses water at twice the rate of our rapid population growth, there is simply not enough available, sustainable supplies of freshwater in more and more parts of the world on current trajectories and practices, to meet the needs for food, energy, goods and accessible safe drinking water for our 6.7 billion, much less the 9 billion we’re becoming by 2050. Due to the uneven distribution of population pressures and water availability, global society is polarizing into water “Haves” and “Have-Nots.”

The impending water crisis presents two great challenges — one environmental and one political. Because we’re drawing more water from the environment than is replenished through the natural water cycle, vital freshwater ecosystems are becoming seriously degraded across the globe, according to the first comprehensive audit of the planet’s environmental health, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

For the first time since the dawn of civilization, we must consciously allocate water to sustain the health of the ecosystems that provide the source of water for all society’s fundamental uses.

So much water is withdrawn from over 70 major rivers, including the Nile, Indus, Yellow, Euphrates, and Colorado, that their flow no longer reaches their deltas and the sea. Nearly all the world’s major rivers have been dammed. Half the world’s wetlands — nature’s protective sponges — have vanished. Agrochemical and industrial pollution is devastating fish life, and contaminating human drinking supplies. Mountain glaciers from the Himalayas to the Andes are melting at rates never before seen in history, drying up the sources of great rivers and threatening the stability of the nations that depend upon its waters: the Indus River, vital lifeline of nuclear-armed, Taliban-besieged Pakistan, is expected to lose 30% of its flow as its Himalayan source glacier vanishes even as its population relentlessly increases by a third over the next generations.

To make up shortfall of freshwater, India, Pakistan, northern China, and California, among others, are mining groundwater — creating “food bubbles” that are starting to burst as the pumps hit the bottom of the aquifers.

As the environmental crisis worsens, the political perils become more explosive. Freshwater scarcity is a key reason why 3.5 billion people — including those in current grain exporter India, as well as throughout the bone-dry Middle East — are projected to live in countries that cannot feed themselves by 2025 and will depend increasingly on volatile imported food prices for their well-being and survival. Humanitarian and health crises are likely to emanate from the 2.6 billion without adequate sanitation and the 1 billion who lack safe, accessible drinking water.

Climate change is the water crisis in hyper-drive: It wreaks its damage through unpredictable, extreme water-related events like droughts, floods, mudslides, rising sea levels, and glacier melts that overwhelm critical water infrastructures built for traditional weather patterns; within a decade there are likely to be 150 million climate (really water-crisis) refugees wandering within and across borders seeking new livelihoods and homes.

Failing states become breeding grounds for regional instabilities, wars and international terrorism, such as came out of water-famished Yemen in last Christmas’ failed airplane suicide bomber attempt in Detroit, or sea piracy such as the rampant piracy off the coast of Somalia in the Horn of Africa.

China’s breakneck growth bid to become an economic superpower hinges partly on whether it can overcome critical water scarcity challenges that are its economic Achilles Heel — with only one-fifth the amount of water per person as the U.S, it has had to idle factories and abandon major energy projects, and faces water pollution so severe that its waters can’t even be used for agriculture.

From the irrigated agricultural revolution at the dawn of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus, to the steam-powered Industrial Revolution, to the 20th century’s giant dams pioneered at the Hoover Dam, control of water has been a key axis of power and wealth.

Major breakthroughs have been associated with the rise and decline of great states and turning points of human civilization. And so it is again today, with the impending freshwater scarcity crisis.

History teaches that a difficult adjustment lies ahead, just as it has whenever population levels and key resource bases have gotten unsustainably out of balance. The chief question is how much suffering the adjustment will entail, and which societies make the nimblest adaptations and emerge as world leaders and which will not and decline.

There are two basic choices: 1) To boost the productivity of existing water resources through difficult political changes and improved efficiencies or 2) to buy time by mining groundwater or building long pipelines that transfer water from regions with temporary surplus to those with current scarcity in the hope that a new silver bullet technology akin to the 20th century’s giant dams will emerge in the meantime to save the day.

In the main, societies have been following the path of least political resistance and choosing the latter. Yet the savior technologies — desalination, genetically-modified crops, recycling wastewater are most often mentioned — do not seem likely to arrive in time or sufficient scale to cover the growing global shortfalls.

Former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously predicted a quarter century ago that the “wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.”

While nations so far have found more reasons to cooperate than go to war over water, pressures are mounting rapidly with rising population and absolute scarcity levels. The greater, imminent risk today is failed states, and all the fall-out they will spread. To its credit, the Obama Administration recently recognized that the global water crisis is a vital threat to U.S. national security and diplomatic interests, and is elevating water security as a central objective of State Department foreign policymaking. Yet it is not enough.

The Earth, like ourselves, is 70% water. So nothing is more important on Earth Day than taking care of our water — which is also to say, ourselves.

Millions of Sudanese have just finished voting in their country’s first multiparty elections in 24 years. Election officials estimate that, in a relatively peaceful process, turnout of registered voters exceeded 70 percent nationwide, including up to 55 percent in one state in war-ravaged Darfur.

The voting period was extended from three to five days due to a host of technical problems and irregularities. Sometime this week, the National Election Commission will announce the results.

Yet despite the higher than expected estimated turnout, the election should hardly be a cause for celebration among advocates for democracy. At the top of the ballot, Sudanese leader and indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir’s name appeared as his party’s candidate for president.

Bashir took power via military coup in 1989. In the years since, his regime prosecuted a war in the south from 1989 through 2005 and, more notoriously, has conducted a deadly policy of mass murder and displacement in Darfur since 2003.

On the surface, the Bashir government has made all the right moves, urging all Sudanese parties to participate and asking the international community to observe the process. But the facts on the ground show a government that has engaged in political repression and intimidation, and an election that fell short of international standards.

Citing the restrictive environment, in the last week of the campaign period leading opposition parties announced a general boycott of the elections. As the results from the election are counted up, one thing is clear: A “democratically elected” Bashir government will be no less ruthless and oppressive than the Bashir military dictatorship.

Yet since last fall, the Obama administration has avoided directly challenging the credibility of Sudan’s elections, despite being heavily engaged in mediation efforts across Sudan. Many analysts feel that the U.S. merely wants to get past the elections in order to focus on the critical referendum for south Sudan scheduled for January 2011 — a vote that many expect will lead to the south’s secession from Sudan. It’s an outcome that the U.S. favors, predicting that the south will be a reliable, oil-producing ally in restive East Africa.

In a bid to set the table for next year, the administration has seemed ready to accept the legitimization of the Bashir regime in this month’s vote in exchange for his cooperation on the referendum.

But with the election’s legitimacy in tatters, President Obama must be clear that the election of Bashir will have no effect on how the U.S. views those in power in Khartoum — as an unrepresentative clique that refuses to loosen their firm grip on the country.

And regardless of the results, the administration must continue to pressure all parties to bring comprehensive and durable peace to Darfur, implement the final stages of the north-south peace agreement that mandates the 2011 referendum, and carry on the long process of democratization that serves as the most solid foundation for durable peace.

Sean Brooks is a policy analyst at the Save Darfur Coalition. He recently returned from a month-long trip to Sudan.

The facts say it all. About 17% of American children ages 2-19 are obese. Obese children are more likely than other children to have high blood pressure, high cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes. They are also more likely to be obese as adults.

Add in the fact that obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years and we have ourselves a serious problem.

So what to do about it?

First Lady Michelle Obama says Let’s Move. Her new inter-agency task force to eradicate childhood obesity had a summit at the White House last week.

Some of the solutions bandied about at the meeting focused on advertising, marketing, food labels, the food supply in schools, nutrition assistance programs, the high cost of healthy food, breast feeding, physical activity and educating both adults and children about healthy lifestyle choices. The task force will report their recommendations to President Obama in May.

But is that enough? What do you think? What’s the solution?

And if 34% of adults are obese, how do we ensure that our children make healthy choices?

In the view of the United States, the University’s limited use of race in its admissions program falls within the constitutional bounds delineated by the Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

The University’s effort to promote diversity is a paramount government objective. See Grutter, 539 U.S. at 330-331. In view of the importance of diversity in educational institutions, the United States, through the Departments of Education and Justice, supports the efforts of school systems and post-secondary educational institutions that wish to develop admissions policies that endeavor to achieve the educational benefits of diversity in accordance with Grutter.

The losing side in the pending case will likely take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

What do you think? Are admissions policies that include considerations of race and ethnicity a form of discrimination or simply a method for achieving much-needed diversity in education?

Share your thoughts with us and they may be used in an upcoming video blog.

A clown performs during the traditional march through central Kiev to mark April Fools' Day on April 1, 2010.

If you intended to Google your pesky neighbor this morning only to find that you were forced to “Topeka” his name, then you fell for an April Fools’ prank.

LOL!

Here’s a quick round-up of all things foolish so that you won’t get caught off guard again.

1) See here, here and here for explanations of the origins of the day.

2) TechCrunch is providing a “Definitive List” of April Fools’ 2010 pranks with grades. They give YouTube an “A” for offering a “text only mode” for videos, and Starbucks gets a “B+” for its “micra” and “plenty” sizes.

3) The Christian Science Monitor provides a list of past pranks from around the world.

4) If you want to play a prank but are out of ideas, here’s a list of low-tech gags. It includes time-honored practical jokes like glueing coins to the ground and saran-wrapping a toilet seat.

5) And if you were thinking of playing any pranks at work, here’s a warning.

So, how was your April Fools’ Day? Did you fall for a banana in the tailpipe? Share your April Fools’ jokes, pranks and stories with us.

In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray warned us in The Bell Curve that “genetic partitioning” was increasingly responsible for economic and intellectual disparity. “Success and failure in the American economy, and all that goes with it,” they wrote, “are increasingly a matter of the genes that people inherit.”

They were neither the first nor the last to insist in the idea of a genetic underclass. In fact, we’ve all been taught to think that humans are somewhat segregated from one another by lucky and unlucky batches of good and bad genes. Some groups, or random individuals, are said to be genetically less intelligent than others, while other groups have gene-driven athletic or musical or artistic ability.

I believe science now strongly suggests that this gene-gift paradigm, which so powerfully has shaped our thinking for a century, is fundamentally incorrect. There is no genetic underclass or overclass, and most of us are not genetically doomed to mediocrity. Quite to the contrary: the human genome that we all share is itself designed to respond to challenges and demands, and that — as Cornell University developmental psychologist Stephen Ceci says — “We have no way of knowing how much unactualized genetic potential exists.”

Because we have been trained to think about “nature vs. nurture” in such stark terms, a lot of people will read the above statement and think that I’m just trying to swing us back to the nurture side of the argument and am denying the influence of genes. But I’m really not.

There’s a whole new way to think about these matters, one which embraces genetic differences and their profound influence. We now have an opportunity to help the general public understand what geneticists and most other scientists have already understood about genes for years: that all genetic influence happens in dynamic interaction with environmental inputs.

“There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment,” explains McGill University’s Michael Meaney. “And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. [A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment.”

Genes are not like robot actors who always say the same lines in the exact same way. It turns out that they interact with their surroundings and can say different things depending on whom they are talking to. This obliterates the long-standing metaphor of genes as blueprints with elaborate predesigned instructions for eye color, thumb size, mathematical quickness, musical sensitivity, etc. Instead, genes are more like volume knobs and switches that get turned up/down/on/off at any time — by another gene or by any minuscule environmental input.

This flipping and turning takes place constantly. It begins the moment a child is conceived and doesn’t stop until she takes her last breath. Rather than giving us hardwired instructions on how a trait must be expressed, this process of gene-environment interaction drives a unique developmental path for every unique individual.

And here’s the best part: we can impact that process. We can’t ever control it completely, of course, but as parents, as teachers, and as a culture, we can impact it. I was thrilled to talk to Tavis about how this works. It begins with an understanding of what genes really are, and continues with revelations about the real sources of intelligence and abilities.

David Shenk is an award-winning author of six books. His most recent, The Genius in All of Us, has been hailed by The New York Times as “deeply interesting and important.” For more about Shenk and his book, visit GeniusBlog.

When you read about the unemployment rate in this country, which has been hovering around 10% for a while now, it’s easy to forget that the rate is different depending on where you live in the country, whether you are a man or a woman and whether you are Black, Latino or white.

The Joint Economic Committee released a report this month which found that although “African Americans make up 11.5% of the labor force, they account for 17.8% of the unemployed, 20.3% of those unemployed for more than six months and 22.1% of the workers unemployed for a year or more.”

African Americans are the face of what is known as the chronically unemployed. And while they have been severely impacted by The Great Recession, a report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that within the African American community, high unemployment rates pre-dated the recession.

That report goes on to state that lower educational attainment of Blacks is not the only contributing factor. According to the study, “In the three years before the recession, the unemployment rate for African American’s with bachelor’s degrees was 7.5 percent. This rate was closest to the rate for whites with only a high school diploma, 6.3 percent.”

And according to the National Urban League’s annual report, “The State of Black America,” Latinos “are faring better than Blacks,” though not by much.

The Congressional Black Caucus took up the issue of the chronically unemployed last week, in a hearing called “Out of Work But Not Out of Hope: Addressing the Crisis of the Chronically Unemployed.”

“While there is no question that all Americans are hurting, today’s report clearly illustrates that racial disparities existed before the recession and those gaps have only grown. Although recent economic data has shown signs of improvement, this study indicates the pace of the recovery has been uneven, with African Americans lagging behind.”